July 18 (Bloomberg) -- Take one Manhattan hedge-fund boss
who exults in Cristal-soaked bacchanalias. Add a disillusioned
quant who made billions for the fund before turning 30.

Throw in a kickboxing U.S. Treasury agent in Hong Kong who
tracks down financial terrorists by day and plays Texas Hold ’Em
in a slinky black dress by night.

The characters in “The Last Trade” by James Conway come
straight out of central casting, even if the author is “a
hedge-fund insider” writing under a pseudonym, as his publisher
says. The result is a pacey if predictable thriller.

As the story gets under way, it’s Monday, Oct. 17, 2011.
Drew Havens, a boy scout of a quant who sips diet cola amid
revelers snorting coke, is preparing to quit the Rising hedge
after pocketing his bonus.

Though Havens made himself and his boss, Rick Salvado, rich
by predicting the subprime meltdown, he lost his marriage and
something of his soul along the way. To make matters worse, his
models and numbers don’t support Salvado’s latest investment
blitz, an all-in bet on a U.S. economic recovery.

Havens’s sleep-deprived protege -- a Clash-loving quant
with a taste for hacking -- has meanwhile picked up the digital
spoor of bets being placed against the same American stocks that
Salvado is piling into. Someone, presumably in the U.S., appears
to have used a Berlin middleman to funnel a massive wave of
these trades through a Hong Kong broker named Patrick Lau.

Killer Trades

The hacked middleman’s server in Berlin also shows that
similar onslaughts are being ordered through a broker in Dubai.
As Havens’s protege digests this, he spots an ominous message on
the Berlin computer: “Kill Patrick Lau.”

When Lau is found with a 9-mm bullet blown through his
skull, Havens and Treasury agent Cara Sobieski find themselves
racing against the clock to stop a sequence of deadly trades
being placed with a different broker in a different city each
day of the week. The evidence -- such as it is -- suggests that
the trades will climax on Friday with a bloodbath.

The narrative is marred by cliches (think “scantily
clad”) and geek bravado (“Every model ends with me in jail,”
Havens intones after roughing up a bad guy). There’s also a
jarring reference to Libor as the London Interbank “Overnight
Index,” instead of offered rate.

Yet the plot hums along as it cuts back and forth between
Sobieski hopping from city to city, Havens fleeing a killer with
a shaved head and brokers being hunted down after executing
trades. Just the thing for a flight from JFK to Johannesburg.

Noir ‘Short’

If you’re looking for a financial thriller with more
literary chops, pick up an older book, “Short” by Cortright
McMeel, an energy trader whose writing crackles with authentic
dialogue and noir humor.

McMeel takes us inside Allied Power in Boston, where rogues
and gamblers gather round a 45-feet-long Formica slab to trade,
shout down squawk boxes and torment the staff “goat,” Sami,
who wonders why he bothered getting an MBA from Yale.

The unlikely hero is Joe Gallagher, an oafish trader who
looks like an “overgrown toddler,” eats and drinks with a
Rabelaisian appetite and gets “a chocolate-milk epiphany” from
his daytime beverage of choice. He’s a new kid on the desk, the
protege of a sumo-sized head trader called Andrews.

Andrews is a natural bull who puts his faith in “the
process of eternal consumption, progress and expansion,” like a
railroad baron of old, McMeel writes. He believes in “taking
profits and enduring pain.”

Ghost Trader

The hurt soon arrives in the sinewy shape of Randall
Jennings, a.k.a. the Ghost, a trading legend brought in over
Andrews’s head because the bosses are greedy for even bigger
profits. The Ghost wears tinted glasses to mask the nystagmus
that makes his eyes flick back and forth involuntarily.

Resolved to eliminate rivals and recruit venal henchmen, he
sizes up his new charges through a monocular. He wastes no time
in laying a trap for Andrews, whose probity would prevent the
Ghost from deploying legally questionable trading strategies.

McMeel sketches his crowd of misfits -- including a
loudmouthed pig of a New York Mercantile Exchange broker wearing
a Stetson -- in bold strokes and a harsh satirical light. Then
he eases them into an all-too-plausible plot.

As the mercury rises and the hurricane season approaches,
traders fixate on a possible “heat dome,” a blast of heat
across the Great Plains that would make gas and power prices
surge. Serious money and reputations will soon be made and lost.

“The Last Trade” is published by Dutton (395 pages,
$26.95). “Short” is from Thomas Dunne (295 pages, $24.99). To
buy these books in North America, click here for “The Last
Trade” and here for “Short.”

(James Pressley writes for Muse, the arts and leisure
section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)